Someone is dead set to air the spy agency’s dirty laundry in The Delirium Brief, the next installment to Charles Stross’ Hugo Award-winning comedic dark fantasy Laundry Files series!

Bob Howard’s career in the Laundry, the secret British government agency dedicated to protecting the world from unspeakable horrors from beyond spacetime, has entailed high combat, brilliant hacking, ancient magic, and combat with indescribably repellent creatures of pure evil. It has also involved a wearying amount of paperwork and office politics, and his expense reports are still a mess.

Now, following the invasion of Yorkshire by the Host of Air and Darkness, the Laundry’s existence has become public, and Bob is being trotted out on TV to answer pointed questions about elven asylum seekers. What neither Bob nor his managers have foreseen is that their organization has earned the attention of a horror far more terrifying than any demon: a British government looking for public services to privatize.

Inch by inch, Bob Howard and his managers are forced to consider the truly unthinkable: a coup against the British government itself.

Laundry Files1. The Atrocity Archives2. The Jennifer Morgue3. The Fuller Memorandum4. The Apocalypse Codex5. The Rhesus Chart6. The Annihilation Score7. The Nightmare Stacks

Praise for The Delirium Brief

“Stross still spins a heck of a yarn.” —Kirkus Reviews on The Delirium Brief

"Gaudy and gory....This is Stross in one of his darker moods....The political side of the book...signals some of the real-world anxieties that stand behind the entire series." —Locus on The Delirium Brief

“Combines a le Carré-style espionage thriller with Lovecraftian horror to great effect.” —The Guardian on The Fuller Memorandum

“Smart, literate, funny.”—Lev Grossman, author of The Magicians

“A bizarre yet effective yoking of the spy and horror genres.”—The Washington Post Book World

“Imagine a world where gnarly Lovecraftian demons are all too real yet are routinely neutralized with high-tech wizardry by a supersecret British spy agency, and you'll get an inkling of the genre-bending territory Stross explores in his Laundry Files novels.” —Booklist on The Fuller Memorandum

Reviews from Goodreads

Charles Stross

CHARLES STROSS is a British SF writer, born in Leeds, England, and living in Edinburgh, Scotland. He has worked as a tech writer, a programmer, a journalist, and a pharmacist; he holds degrees in pharmacy and in computer science. He has won three Hugo Awards for his short fiction, including in 2014 for Equoid, a Laundry Files novella originally published on Tor.com.